I cover the video game industry, write about gamers, and review video games.
You can follow me on Twitter and hit me up there if you have any questions or comments you'd like to chat about.
Disclosure: Many of the video games I review were provided as free review copies. This does not influence my coverage or reviews of these games.
I do not own stock in any of the companies I cover. I do not back any Kickstarter projects related to video games. I do not fund anyone in the industry on Patreon.

Conan O'Brien, Hitman, And Ludonarrative Dissonance In Video Games

“Ludonarrative dissonance, a term first coined by the game designer Clint Hocking, arises whenever a video game’s fiction says one thing and its gameplay says an opposite thing,” video game critic Tom Bissell wrote in his review of Max Payne 3. “Some designers and critics regard ludonarrative dissonance as a core problem in modern game design.”

Oddly, game design has done little to distance itself from this problem.

Take, for example, Hitman: Absolution. This is a stealth game about a bald guy with a barcode tattooed to the back of his head. You can put on a costume to disguise yourself, but the disguise is blown if people wearing the same clothes get too close to you. Sometimes shooting a car causes it to blow up; often it does not. I don’t mean to pick on Hitman either; many games are much worse at this sort of inconsistency.

The above video game “review” of Hitman: Absolution by Conan O’Brien is probably the best review of that game that I’ve encountered, largely because it hilariously and unwittingly exposes some of the most irritating and consistent flaws in video game design.

Basically each of his jokes says something profoundly important about games whether or not he realizes it, and this is (I suspect) mainly because here we have someone who doesn’t play video games at all playing one and simply speaking his mind. The conceit of many video games these days is that you can get away with bad writing and preposterous narrative choices simply because it’s a game.

After all, if a game like Call of Duty is the top seller year over year, why do anything to change? That franchise is brimming with ludonarrative dissonance, but it sells like hotcakes.

In modern games you can have a stealth title where the AI simply stops looking for you after a while even though you’ve been running around killing them off one at a time, a fact they’re well aware of but apparently too forgetful to care about.

You can have a game in which you slaughter hordes upon hordes of enemies only to suddenly cut to a pre-rendered scene where one simple bullet takes your avatar down for the count. You are helpless against these cut-scenes in a way that you are never helpless against your digital opponents.

I think that as players of games, as consumers who spend vast amounts of time playing them, we can sometimes forget how ludicrous they can be to an outsider. We can overlook the small details that, to a non-gamer, might be much more garish and obtuse. Not that “outsiders” should necessarily determine the future of game design; rather, games should strive to be more sensible in terms of not just story, but in terms of clear cut rules that make sense within the game world itself. And we should be less complacent.

Thanks to everyone who pointed me toward Conan O’Brien as a model for game review scores. Spot on.

P.S. The flipside to this is that a game like Hitman is, regardless of its foibles, pretty fun at times. Games can get away with this stuff not only because we’re complacent, but because they can still be fun regardless. Though I would argue that they are more fun when they follow a strict set of internal rules that make sense both in terms of narrative and gameplay.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

J. Shea of Exploring Believability have discuss about this recently. Ludonarrative dissonance he believes is something that would prevent games to be regarded as art. I kinda agree with his opinion, especially when Ludonarrative dissonance become so jarring and force us to say “no problem, it is usual in game”. Most Bioware game are heavy offenders of this.

But usually Ludonarrative dissonance didn’t really much problem for ridiculous games to begin with like GTA San Andreas (and it become matters again with GTA IV as it try to become realistic). Want to do realism? Don’t do it half-hearted. Either make your character as frail as they did in cutscene.

As an avid PC gamer and member of 20ID [url]http://www.20id.org/[/urk] One of the longest running, and most accomplished teams in PC gaming history, I should point out that LudoNarritive is culturally pre-requisite to videogames.

If it feels too real, if it emulates real consequences, if it was a true mirror, then it would be a military grade simulation costing untold millions . Video games are currently amongst the most sophisticated pieces of living software, and along the design process there are checks made to keep it in the realm of a “game”. This is fundamental to game design. The mechanics and inner workings of a system are entirely circumstantial to the game.

I would expect that in a game of chess a knight could easily slay a king, queen or pawn, however a “tower” would present an insurmountable obstacle for a lowly knight, how would one defeat the other? Through game mechanics.

IRL, In real life, in a similar situation, i might be able to perform an action which would make my task easier, more efficient, more natural. But often these actions would break what we call “game balance”. There is a reason when i am mounted in a turret atop a humvee which has modified armor shielding my backside, that there is a tiny bit of my head pops out the top. In real life i would simply slink 2 inches lower in the canopy, but instead i make an incredibly small high value target for the opposing forces. Rock, Paper, Scissors taken just as literally would be equally broken, yet it symbolized the balance which game designers strive to achieve.

Ludonarrative dissonance does not refer to the gap between game fiction and realism; it is about the consistency within gameplay and game fiction that make a game plausible—even if we’re talking the plausibility of super heroes.

For instance, Dark Souls has been brought up in the comment thread. It is a good example of a game that is not “realistic” at all (the story of a “chosen undead” rarely is) but its gameplay and fiction are never at odds. There is never a moment when your avatar in the fiction of the game is somehow more frail or more powerful than she is in the gameplay itself.

Beyond this, suggesting that games run the risk of being “too real” seems like a pretty unimportant concern at this point. Let’s worry about crossing that bridge when we get there; we’re certainly not even close to that point yet.

Chess is also an interesting example, because there is no ludonarrative dissonance in chess. There are basic rules that the game never, ever strays from. In the rules of the game, the Queen is the most powerful piece. There is never a moment when, in chess, suddenly you cut to a predetermined scene in which the pawn suddenly, outside the rules of the game, one-shots the Queen to death.

I know this is 2 weeks old, but i’m glad i came back to see your reply Kirk.

I did misunderstand the definition of Ludonarrative dissonance, and you definately cleared that up. Really it was stumbling upon a piece of this myself which made me come back here to post.

Have you played Crysis 3?

about an Hour into the game your companion “Psycho” tries to kick a rusty door in, but buckles back because he has a bum knee. He references this point earlier in the game too, to further point out that you, the player are the only one who still wears the nanosuit, and that Psycho’s “just human” his bad knee showing his frailties.

Not 20 minutes later, I have to jump down a hole that’s easily 20 meters deep. The game instructs me to engage my “armor mode” to absorb the impact of the fall, else i lose my life. The fall takes me down to near-death, my visor has that all-too familliar splattered ketchup look. And who’s behind me? I look up to see the lowly human Psycho drop down without breaking a sweat, the dialogue barely addresses it.

Surely having Psycho find a rope would have made more narritive sense, and i’m sure we can only assume that it was a budget constraint on the game, it was extra, not the core game, expendable.

We can only hope that with the PS4 (and if all industry leaks are to be trusted xbox720 aswell) using AMD A10 chips both sharing the same x86 architecture, this will mean less resources need to be devoted to coding your game on 3 different platforms (Xbox, PS, and PC) now they only have to code for 1 platform essentially.